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If Oscar Wilde had written Death Wish, it would read likeDirty Weekend. This is a brave, brilliant and beautiful book. I wish I had written it - Julie Burchill

When I finished with this book, I threw it in the bin...This book deserves no other fatethan to be trashed, for that is what it is. It has no redeeming literary features whatsoever - Melanie Phillips, author 'Londonistan'

Dirty Weekend is an act of writing that is avant-garde in the literal sense...A literary turning point - Naomi Wolf, New Statesman & Society

This isn't liberated - this is sick rubbish - Edwina Currie, MP

Deadpan in style, shocking in content...Every moral and emotional preconception is subjected to a literary assault and battery. The polished rhythms and frightening finesse of the prose leave you stunned - The Daily Telegraph

Offensive and trite and tedious -Nicci Gerrard, The Observer

Taut prose, black humour and a confrontational style make this a challenging and terrifyingly funny first novel - Time Out

One of the funniest books I've ever read. Zahavi's deadpan humour transforms the most horrible situations into ironic reflections on the woman's lot -Helen West, Living Marxism

Explicit, obscene, repellent - Angela Lambert, The Independent

No novel of recent memory has altered me more profoundly...This is black comedy at its finest. The whole book takes place right on the ironic edge between madness and absolute enlightenment...If I had an extra hundred grand i'd buy the screen rights to this in a flash - Bill English, The Santa Rosa Sun

A slim, sharp stiletto of a book -Jim McClellan, i-D Magazine

Excruciatingly well-written. If ever a war were just, it's the one declared by plucky, poignant, homicidal Bella - Zoe Fairbairns, Everywoman

As writing, beneath contempt - Kirkus Reviews

Above all Dirty Weekend is a novel composed of language so gorgeous, so precise and witty, that I found myself laughing and thought, I should be crying instead. Nothing pleases me more than to be surprised into consciousness - Kathy Acker

Zahavi is disturbed - Private Eye

Don't come looking for Jane Austen, but if you can stand the ride you may enjoy Zahavi's free skating wit on very thin ice - Nicholas Marston, GQ

Truly shocking. The horror is not in her action but in the emotionless, remorseless way Zahavi tells the tale - Carl Hindmarch, The Guardian

The literary sensation of the year - Alex Kershaw, City Limits

Disturbing because it is funny - John Lennard, Times Literary Supplement

A seething account of a slag with a bloodlust that has a dynamism all its own - David Hughes, Mail on Sunday

Whatever happened to love? Come to that whatever happened to the once reputable house of Macmillan? -Peter Grosvenor, Daily Express

Though trailed as phallophobic dungaree polemic, the story is unexpectedly couched in a stripped-down version of Martin Amis at his most mannered, with its subliminal appeal to fascism - Martin Cropper, The Sunday Telegraph

Disorientating and powerful...There are no apologies here. Bella is not an oppressed housewife or a downtrodden working girl. She is not suffering from PMS or incest abuse or even semiotics. Bella is just Anywoman, any woman who has reached the limit - Bettina Berch, Belles Lettres

Dirty Weekend should carry a warning: this book contains violent passages which could seriously offend...It is a shattering book, which demands a single, uninterrupted sitting in which to unfold its dirty tale - Bridget Frost, Writers' Monthly

Zahavi upset a lot of people when this book, her first, was published last year. Not surprisingly, really. You can't break taboos and expect people to like you for it - but you can expect a bit of notoriety. Her story is one of sexual violence, perversion and murder, the details messily and lovingly elaborated - and her killer is a woman...It sounds unpleasant, and it is. But it is also terribly funny, with some marvellous dialogue - The Sunday Times

Revel in this reactionary radical feminist splatterpunk rant...It's a good book, pun-laden, cold-blooded and chillingly hateful. It screams for a sequel - Steven Wells, New Musical Express

Death Wish meets American Psycho in the murderous hands of Bella, who carries out a number of horrifyingly entertaining slayings (by hammer, by suffocation, by luxury auto)...Sensitive readers may decry this as yet another misandrist fantasy, but the author's high Brit wit and sense of fair play - Bella only kills creeps - get her off the hook -Esquire

What saves the story from becoming a lurid feminist cartoon is the author's first-rate literary craft, her glinting, rapier wit and staccato delivery charged with menace. Zahavi writes rings around long-time practitioners of the psychological thriller - Publishers Weekly

Satirical black comedy that uses its shock tactics with skill and seriousness - Independent on Sunday

An exhilarating little homily. Not so much fin de siècle. More fin des hommes -Sally Feldman, The Bookseller

A feminist jihad...Zahavi's literary techniques come from de Sade, out of Angela Carter, by Monique Wittig: this is de Sade as feminist fable...Deeply, darkly comic - Peter Hutchings, Sydney Morning Herald

In the character of Bella, the humiliation and anger of Everywoman has been condensed, compressed and let explode against the oppressive weight of Everyman - Sunday Tribune

Truthful depictions of the bitter face of our lives are threatening, horrific and often closely followed by shouts of 'ban it'...Dirty Weekend has been attacked in the media for its explicit sexual and violent content, and everybody seems to have missed the ideological point behind Zahavi's book: A woman said NO! - Elorine Grant, Spare Rib

One of the few books I've read this year that lives up to the extravagant claims of the publisher - FM 101 Brisbane

This is hardly a novel. It is a work of radical feminist propaganda - Sam Ashman, Socialist Worker Review

A lucid, angry polemic, in which the internal logic is clearly that of satire - James Runcie, The Daily Telegraph

The central character of this extraordinary novel is a symbol of every woman as the victim of male sexuality, assaulted each day by pornography, peeping Toms, kerb crawlers, heavy breathers and obscene language...Written in a nervy, teasing style - alternately simmering with amusing cynicism and seething with long-suppressed anger -Celia Brayfield, She

Dirty Weekend deliberately gets under your skin, up your nose, and anywhere else it can provoke reaction...Shot through with a wonderfully black humour and satirical edge that further distinguish it from much contemporary thriller fiction - Chris Foreham,Pulp!

Literary censorship is once again a hot and sexy topic. Every pisseur de copie in town is moaning about Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Helen Zahavi's Dirty Weekend: Ellis's book is the most repulsive ever written; Zahavi is pathologically disturbed; we must reassess the censorship laws. Where have these people been?...As Jean Rhys wrote of the English: "They ask to be shocked and long to be shocked...but when you really shock them...how shocked they are!" -Elizabeth J. Young, New Statesman & Society